On The Trail Of The Florida Cowboy)

THE LONG, LOW MOAN OF AN AMTRAK train`s horn carries across the muggy swamps and savannahs around Lake Okeechobee to the cattle chutes on the home ranch of the Adams family`s far-flung empire.

``Whup, git `em in there, boys,`` yells Lee Adams.

It`s the annual shipping time, and 2,000 young Florida steers are being herded through the chutes and up the loading ramps into trucks. All across inland South and Central Florida, from Indiantown north to Kissimmee, from Fort Pierce west to Arcadia, other cowboys are loading hundreds of thousands of steers onto cattle trucks.

As the Amtrak train speeds on through the heart of cattle country, most passengers on the Miami-New York run are totally unaware -- as are most Floridians -- that they are passing through the oldest and one of the biggest cattle states in the nation.

Lee Adams` grandfather, Alto Adams, founded the family empire almost 50 years ago on the great, flat prairie west of Fort Pierce. Today, the Adams home ranch, one of four cattle ranches in Florida and one in Texas owned by the family, is 12 miles west of Florida`s Turnpike.

In 1937, when Alto Adams began cattle ranching, cowboying in Florida was just emerging from the last days of the fence and range wars, with gangs of rustlers being hunted down and shot by sheriffs` posses. That same year, one of the last big trail drives across one of the last open frontiers in the nation moved 160 miles across South Florida without encountering a fence.

Today, cattle country lies south of Disney World, and runs almost coast-to- coast in regions of Central and South Florida. Its cow towns are Okeechobee, Yeehaw Junction, Kenansville, Kissimmee, Brighton, Arcadia and Fort Meade. Its watering holes on Saturday nights are such colorful beer joints as the Speckled Perch in Okeechobee and the Red Alligator in Kenansville.

Pete Lanier, who has been a lawman in cattle country for 12 years with the Florida Department of Law Enforcement (FDLE), jokes about such places and their clientele: ``It`s where if you don`t have a gun when you go in, they give you one at the door -- just to kind of keep things even.``

FLORIDA IS THE BIGGEST CATTLE state east of the Mississippi River. More than one million cattle and at least 2,000 cowboys compose the second biggest segment -- second only to the citrus crop -- in the Sunshine State`s $4.6- billion agricultural industry.

Florida is also the last stand of the horse-mounted cowboy, because in the western states, cattle ranchers now use four-wheel-drive vehicles and helicopters to round up their herds.

In Florida, modern transportation simply isn`t practical. Most of the state`s five million acres of pasture and range are located in vast grasslands and marshes. Its cattle ranges are on terrain criss-crossed with irrigation and water canals and strung with hammocks, dense islands of trees, sawgrass and brush. These are best still worked from horseback.

The life of the Florida cowboy is also a lot tougher than most of his western counterparts. There are alligators likely to eat calves or charge horses. Boots and tack rot in the heat and humidity of the afternoon thunderstorms that make Florida`s long summer the wettest in the nation.

An experienced hand knows he needs mosquito netting to bed down at night, knows to shake out his boots and saddle bags before using them to get rid of the snakes curled within, knows to sleep light because a herd bedded down for the night can be spooked into a stampede by the roar of a gator, the hoot of an owl or the scream of a panther.

Then there is the standard Florida steer -- not the placid Hereford of the Midwest and West, but the ill-tempered, long-horned Brahma and its progeny, cross-bred to withstand Florida`s heat, rains and insects.

And there are the people -- newcomers moving into Florida at the rate of 1,000 a week, crowding south from the Orlando-Disney World metroplex toward the broad Kissimmee Prairie, pressing inland from the surburban sprawl that stretches from Miami to Fort Pierce and, on the Gulf Coast, from Naples to Fort Myers and Sarasota.

Why would a man put up with all this?

Granddaddy Alto Adams, the first of three generations of the Adams family to work cattle in Florida, got into it for his health.

``He had his first heart attack at the age of 36, and the doctor advised him to get into something less stressful,`` says grandson Lee Adams, 35. Alto Adams Sr., Lee explains, traded the peculiar tensions of being a lawyer for the up-front struggles of cattle ranching, although he later served two terms on the Florida Supreme Court.

Alto`s son, Alto ``Bud`` Adams Jr., began managing the ranch in 1948, and today his three sons run the entire operation. Mike Adams is president of the corporation, Lee runs the cattle division, and Robert supervises the citrus division.